Wireless

Another iPhone worm has been spotted in the wild.

Unlike the previous exploitation, which merely changed a jailbroken iPhone's wallpaper to a picture of Rick Astley of "Rickrolling" fame, this new threat allows hackers to steal sensitive information.

According to security firm Sophos, which wrote about the exploitation after a Dutch ISP spotted it late last week, the worm attacks jailbroken iPhone and iPod Touch devices only.

The worm "uses command-and-control, like a traditional PC botnet," Sophos wrote in a blog post on Saturday to warn users about the exploit. "It configures two startup scripts, one to execute the worm on boot-up, and the other to create a connection to a Lithuanian server to upload stolen data and cede control to the bot master."

Jailbreaking, which has been around for about two years, is a hack that enables iPhone and iPod Touch users to download applications unavailable through Apple's App Store.

Sophos wrote that the worm attacks users on several ISPs, including UPC in the Netherlands, Optus in Australia, and T-Mobile in several countries worldwide. Worse, the worm spreads faster on a Wi-Fi connection than a 3G connection. Users with affected devices might notice extremely short battery life while on Wi-Fi. According to Sophos, that's mainly due to the worm engaging in "so much network activity."

When a device is infected, it's assigned a unique number so that the attackers can easily pinpoint a single device. It also looks for authentication systems that use SMS, better known as mTANs. mTANs are frequently used by banks that send an SMS message with a password to mobile phones, allowing people to log in to their online accounts, Sophos wrote.

In essence, this threat is serious.

Sophos recommends that people with infected iPhones and iPod Touch devices restore them back to Apple's most recent firmware update. For now, there is no other way to fix the problem.

Sony is planning a new online store a la Apple's iTunes, but with a few twists.

Announced at a strategy meeting in Tokyo on Thursday, the new service will hawk music, movies, books, and other downloadable content geared for its various electronics, including TVs, mobile phones, music players, and computers.

The service, which Sony aims to launch next year, will link the company's devices and digital content that it produces--setting it apart from other online stores.

"That's the kind of combination that I think is not seen anywhere else," Kazuo Hirai, Sony executive vice president for networked products and services, said in an interview with the Associated Press. "That I think is where our core competence lies, and that's a differentiator for Sony."

Hirai also spoke about the new service with BusinessWeek, saying that it won't just sell products but also tap into social networking by letting people upload their own photos or videos and connect with each other.

"It's not just access content, stream it, and enjoy," Hirai told BusinessWeek. "What are your friends watching right now? There's a screen that says all the programming that's available. It highlights all the things that your friends are watching, for example. It's a community experience."

Called the Sony Online Service for now, it will model itself after the company's successful PlayStation Network, a free service that has captured 33 million registered users who download movies, access social networks, and grab games for the PS3 and portable PSP console. Hirai said that gamers will be able to access the new online service directly through their PlayStation Network accounts.

Of course, Sony has been down this road before in 2005 with its late Sony Connect music service. The aborted iTunes clone was done in by internal politics and a failure to connect with consumers, forcing the company to shut it down in 2007.

But with a new, more cohesive management team put in place by CEO and president Howard Stringer, Sony is hoping to avoid the in-fighting that helped kill Connect.

Sony needs a shot in the arm at this point. Though the company pioneered the portable music concept 30 years ago with its Walkman, it has struggled to compete in the Digital Age. Continuing a string of quarterly losses, Sony took a $292 million net loss in its recent second quarter. Despite cost cuts and layoffs, the company is projecting a total loss of $1.3 billion for the full fiscal year.

When you've lost the first round in your case against Verizon's persistent and persuasive mockery, who do you turn to?

Luke Wilson, that's who. After all, he starred in "Legally Blonde" and, well, "Jackass Number Two."

Actually, Wilson is lovable. Truly lovable. Perhaps if he'd dressed down a little and Justin Long had suffered an interminable hiatus hernia, Wilson might have got the part of Mac, the Microsoft Mocker.

Instead, he has the slightly more difficult task of persuading the folks who adored him in "Old School" that AT&T's 3G will serve them well on the 3.10 to Yuma.

The creators didn't give him much of a script, as I suspect they wrote it a couple of lattes and a shot of bourbon before this opus was filmed in what looks like the empty space above Victoria's Secret in Santa Monica, Calif.

Luke is forced to stand before a board and prove that AT&T has the fastest 3G network, lets you talk and surf at the same time, and offers you more apps that feature people making strange noises, half-clothed women, and animals that smile when you touch the screen. (Disclosure: slight exaggeration)

Sadly, it all looks a little analog. Luke looks as if he'd prefer to be surfing, as he really doesn't have the tools to make you believe what he's being paid to say.

His hair looks as if it's been hurriedly greased with Czech lard and his face offers a certain hemorrhoidal mien as it offers a little jape at the end of the spot. Yes, a jape about Verizon beginning with "V" and AT&T not beginning with "V." That rumbling you can hear is the collective guffaw from Verizon Central.

Verizon is hurting AT&T with its clinical, delighted unpleasantness. And I fear that before "Legally Blonde 2: AT&T's Revenge" can possibly be effective, the iPhone carrier needs to dramatize its argument rather better than the gospel according to Luke.

As consumers increasingly purchase sophisticated smartphones such as the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Droid, they are developing expectations for how these phones allow contacts, calendars, e-mail, and social networks to remain in sync across all their devices.

One of the big challenges is that users don't always maintain the same source of inputting data--they switch from browser to desktop application to smartphone as their data access and entry point, introducing many variables into the data chain. And data integrity will only get more complicated as more applications become browser-based and keep no local data storage.

Most enterprise users have a local store in addition to the cloud storage, something that I still find puzzling from the T-mobile Sidekick outage, where consumer data that should have been in multiple locations (or at least present on the device) was thought to be lost.

The most common sync services are not provided directly by the mobile operator. Generally this is a good thing, as the more you can dis-intermediate the carrier, the more control you have over your data. But because the sync services are provided by others--notably Microsoft, Google, and Apple--you end up locked-in to their data structures as well as whatever privacy and data management issues that might arise in relation to advertising or other usage of your information.

Today, you can fairly easily sync your mobile device with most common online e-mail and PIM services although the BlackBerry, Droid, and the iPhone differ in their approaches--or at least in the visibility of how they work. For example, you can sync with Gmail and other services on the iPhone, but it rather perversely requires the Microsoft ActiveSync protocol.

By controlling the address book, Google and Apple effectively lock-in users to their sync service, leaving the carriers and devices to be easily replaced (minus the cancellation charges.) The user would barely notice the difference, aside from the sticker on his phone that says AT&T or Verizon.

Mobile operators do not want to cede control of the address book to Google or Apple, but they are late to the game and do not yet have sync solutions of their own. As a result, they are scrambling to add this functionality, but building a sync solution that works with all different devices and email services is no easy task, thanks to the widespread problem of device fragmentation in the industry.

One option is to deploy a white label solution, like the open mobile cloud sync offered by Funambol. Funambol CEO Fabrizio Capobianco told me the company has been approached by many of the top mobile operators, with several of them looking to setup sync services for their customers. They all recognize the issue, and according to Capobianco can turn to Funambol as a way to quickly bring a high-quality solution to market.

With all the different players in mobile sync, users will begin to question who owns their data. Enterprise users, in particular, should have privacy concerns about trusting their data to someone else. In the case of Android users, there is a growing anti-Google sentiment, and if Google already owns your email, calendar, and search queries, do you really want them to own your phone contacts as well?

Windows Mobile lost 28 percent of its smartphone market share between last year's third quarter and this year's third quarter, according to market researcher Gartner.

Figures released Thursday by Gartner show that Microsoft's mobile OS had 11 percent of the global smartphone market in Q3 2008. A year later, it had 7.9 percent. Meanwhile, the iPhone's share rose from 12.9 percent to 17.1 percent, and Research In Motion's share jumped from 16 percent to 20.8 percent.

Symbian's share fell from 49.7 percent to 44.6 percent over the same period--a 10 percent drop.

Read more of "Windows Mobile loses nearly a third of market share" at ZDNet UK.

U.K. wireless carrier Orange just started selling the iPhone, and it is trumpeting first-day sales numbers for the device.

(Credit: Apple)

The carrier signed up 30,000 people with a new iPhone contract on Tuesday, its first day selling Apple's smartphone, according to a post on Twitter from a member of Orange's marketing department.

While 30,000 isn't necessarily a lot, compared to the "hundreds of thousands" of iPhones AT&T sold in its first weekend selling the iPhone 3GS in the United States, it's not bad for being the second carrier in a much smaller country, where the iPhone 3GS has been available for four months.

Until Tuesday, wireless provider O2 was the exclusive carrier of the iPhone in the United Kingdom. Orange currently has 16 million mobile customers, compared to O2's 22 million. Incidentally, Orange's experience as the second carrier of the device in a country would seem to make a decent case for Apple releasing the iPhone to more than one carrier in many other countries, including the United States.

The numbers were far more impressive than the iPhone's debut on China Unicom's network last week. China's first crack at selling the iPhone was by most accounts disappointing, with 5,000 units sold over the first four-day period.

Of course, China Unicom is dealing with factors Orange is not. Besides having to sell the iPhone without Wi-Fi connectivity, China has to contend with something U.K. and U.S. carriers largely do not: a vast market for iPhone knockoffs, or gray-market phones.

In the race for mobile phone profits, Apple has overtaken Nokia, according to figures for the latest quarter.

Apple earned $1.6 billion in the third quarter from the iPhone, outpacing Nokia's $1.1 billion cell phone profit to grab the top spot among all mobile phone vendors, said research firm Strategy Analytics on Wednesday.

(Credit: Strategy Analytics)

This is the first quarter that Strategy Analytics has seen Apple surge past Nokia in mobile phone profits, according to Alex Spektor, the author of the research, who spoke with CNET News.

The contest between Apple and Nokia for top phone profits has been tight in recent months. ... Read more

Verizon has decided to take the spirit of Christmas and shove it into the part of iPhone users' chimneys where Santa would need a pick ax.

Some who viewed the first Droid teaser ad, just a couple of weeks ago, were stunned to see Verizon so baldly declare that the Apple uber-machine was, in some ways, deficient.

Rumor had it that this was an isolated attempt at leveraging publicity for the new Motorola device. However, this new ad shows that the iPhone is firmly on Verizon's list. And it's not Verizon's Christmas list.

The ad places the iPhone on the mythical Island of Misfit Toys. It's an island inhabited solely by those things you don't need, don't want and don't work.

At first, the strange collection of pink spotted elephants and peculiar Grandads-in-a-Box-Wearing-Some-Very-Strange-Bits-of-Chiffon are astonished that the iPhone has come to their island.

But then the Verizon version of the little AT&T 3G coverage map helpfully points out that it might be harder to download your beloved apps in some parts of the country.

"You're going to fit right in here!" squeaks a strange little blue object with wings, a propeller and a hearty dose of gallows humor.

Can one ever imagine that Apple might create a version of the "Get a Mac" structure with a new human (Joss Stone, perhaps?) representing the iPhone and a rather more vulnerable human (Kirstie Alley, perhaps?) representing Verizon?

Somehow, that wouldn't quite fit, would it?

The new Verizon Droid, like many a high-profile smartphone just coming onto the market, has been hailed by some as a potential--you know what's coming--iPhone killer. (Chronicling the very first Droid sales in Manhattan the other day, CNET's Maggie Reardon observed that the gadget may actually turn out to be more of a BlackBerry killer.)

But does Verizon Wireless want to deliver a knockout to the iPhone? There's long been speculation that the carrier would sooner or later be offering the Apple smartphone, which since its launch has been solely in the hands of AT&T in the United States. (In some other countries, Apple has deals with multiple carriers.)

The latest posting to suggest an imminent rapprochement between Verizon and the iPhone comes from the AppleInsider blog, which on Friday said that it's gotten wind of Apple having contracted to build a Verizon iPhone that would debut in the third quarter of 2010.

More broadly, according to AppleInsider, the new "hybrid iPhone" will work on both the GSM/UMTS and the CDMA systems, meaning that Apple will be able "to sell a single global handset to all carriers, and specifically to Verizon Wireless in the US." In the U.S., carriers AT&T and T-Mobile are in the GSM/UMTS camp, while Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel are in the CDMA camp. (For more on that topic, see "Going abroad? Don't be afraid to pack the cell phone.")

The "world mode" phone reportedly would have a 2.8-inch screen--that is, roughly 20 percent smaller than the screen on the existing iPhone.

AppleInsider cites a report from the investment research firm OTR Global, which in turn cites "sources in the Taiwan handset supply chain." According to AppleInsider:

The report by OTR Global, provided to AppleInsider by an industry analyst, says the new "world mode" iPhone will gain compatibility with CDMA2000 networks (including Verizon's US network, which is currently incompatible with existing iPhone models) while retaining compatibility with UMTS 3G networks globally using a new hybrid chip produced by Qualcomm.

According to OTR's sources, Asustek subsidiary Pegatron will build the new hybrid phone devices for Apple rather than Hon Hai, the iPhone's current manufacturer. This decision was reportedly made to prevent the company from being "constrained by a single-source assembler."

In the third quarter of 2009, Apple shipped 7.4 million iPhones worldwide, raising its global market share slightly to 17 percent, according to market researcher IDC.

Apple, Verizon, and OTR were not immediately available for comment.

See also:
• Inside the Motorola Droid, an iPhone likeness
• Slow start for the Motorola Droid?
• Survey shows iPhone threatens BlackBerry; Palm holds steady